IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATION:

By 1961, a few universities around the world had bought IBM 7090 mainframes. The 7090 was the first line of all-transistor computers, and it cost US $20 million in today's money, or about 6,000 times as much as a top-of-the-line laptop today. Its early buyers typically deployed the computers as a shared resource for an entire campus. Very few users were fortunate enough to get as much as an hour of computer time per week.

The 7090 had a clock cycle of 2.18 microseconds, so the operating frequency was just under 500 kilohertz. But in those days, instructions were not pipelined, so most took more than one cycle to execute. Some integer arithmetic took up to 14 cycles, and a floating-point operation could hog up to 15. So the 7090 is generally estimated to have executed about 100,000 instructions per second. Most modern computer cores can operate at a sustained rate of 3 billion instructions per second, with much faster peak speeds. That is 30,000 times as fast, so a modern chip with four or eight cores is easily 100,000 times as fast.

Unlike the lucky person in 1961 who got an hour of computer time, you can run your laptop all the time, racking up more than 1,900 years of 7090 computer time every week. 

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